Hiking Mount Mansfield, Vermont Highpoint, Winter 2001

Judy and I had planned an Appalachian Mountain Club
(AMC) weekend trip to Vermont to bag Camel's Hump and Mt. Abraham
for the weekend of January 13th and 14th.
Long after the trip listing had gone to the printers we realized
that it was the MLK weekend, and that we both had Monday off. Since
we both "needed" Mt. Mansfield to complete our winter Vermont 4,000
footers we decided to add an optional Monday hike up that mountain
to the trip.

On Saturday the group hiked up Camel's Hump by the Burrow's
Trail, from the west, and on Sunday we hiked up Mount Abraham by
the Batelle Trail and the Long Trail. The weather was good on both
days, and we had great views from the bare summits.

Most of the participants decided that two days of winter hiking
were enough, and on Monday our group had shrunk to five: Judy and
myself (the two trip leaders) plus Barb, Roger and John. We were
all good friends who often hiked together, so it promised to be a
fun trip in spite of the threat of weather moving in later in the
day.

There are many trails up Mount
Mansfield. We decided to go up the Long Trail (LT) from
Smuggler's Notch (on VT 108, east of the mountain). The LT reaches
the summit over some ledges that would be "interesting" when icy,
so we planned to bypass them by taking the Profanity Trail from
Taft Lodge to the ridge. That would give us a round trip of 4.6
miles with 2,800 feet of elevation gain, for a comfortable half day
hike.

We had breakfast in the cabin where we were staying and drove up
to the end of the plowed section of VT 108, a few hundred feet from
the trailhead. We started out around 9 AM, late for a winter hike
but justified in this case by the short distance involved.

The lower part of the trail was well broken and unmistakable.
Higher up we encountered a maze of ski tracks, as we were in very
nice open woods and close to the downhill ski trails. Clearly many
skiers had opted to leave the official runs and ski through those
open woods. Following the trail turned out to be easier than I had
feared, as there were many blazes. So whenever we reached a
junction one or more of us would follow each possible branch, until
someone shouted "I found a blaze!".

After a couple of miles we reached the Taft Lodge. Here the LT
was completely covered by deep unbroken snow, we were clearly not
the only ones to have decided to bypass the ledges! There was no
clear trail up from the Lodge, but a steep gully went in the right
direction (up!). We followed it, kicking steps in the deep and not
very consolidated snow. We slipped and cursed, but though our
progress was slow the distance was short, and we eventually reached
the ridge.

As we approached the ridge we started feeling the wind. It was,
as is usually the case, coming from the west, so we had been
protected by the mass of the mountain. It was not really bad by
above treeline in winter standards, probably around 30 mph, but we
still were very glad that we had not taken the Sunset Ridge Trail,
which goes up an exposed ridge, on the west side of the mountain,
for over a mile! Fortunately the summit was only about 0.2 mile
along the ridge, we reached and it hurried back to the protected
eastern side of the mountain.

The descent was easy and fun. We glissaded most of the way down
to the Lodge, and had no problem following our snowshoe tracks all
the way down. We reached our cars around 2 PM, just as the
predicted snow was starting to fall. We had a mixture of snow and
rain during the long drive back to Boston. None of us complained,
we had bagged three peaks over that three day weekend!